Periodic Table iPhone app

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/periodic-table-of-elements/id325789896?mt%3D8&ved=0CBAQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNGvkmpWAaxb51nehsWQjXXWcBWHKw Includes the latest elements, exciting after returning to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as a teacher intern (having been a high school intern) and seeing how many elements had been filled in since the 1990's! And some were discovered during Summer 2010 when I was there!

$99 Whiteboard

Enough said:

Cool Science

Was invited to participate in a Chemistry class blog, chemistry being one of the sciences I can participate in (biology NOT being in that company), and happened upon a number of science experiment sites:

• TeachersNet
• Exploratorium's Science of Cooking
• Steve Spengler sells kits, or you can sign up for the weekly enews which sends free experiments
  

Interdisciplinary Curriculum via computer games

On the topic of educational games: "What good are they?", "Oh, those games are just like the drill-and-practice games from the 1980's, they're of no use to students". Well, they're not.

In continued exploration of educational uses of the iPod Touch, I downloaded a number of games and thought, "Well, this teaches math, geography, and critical thinking, in addition to being fun and addictive!" Isn't this the best of all worlds in educating students?

• Chocolatier: think Oregon Trail but it's all about sourcing ingredients for ... CHOCOLATE! You travel to different countries to buy ingredients to make chocolate, use math and critical thinking for projecting how much of each ingredient you need to keep your factories stocked, use memory to recall which nations paid the highest price for your CHOCOLATE, history parallels to understand the transportation routes (Panama Canal, ship route Slave Trade, railroads)
• Mancala: an age old game that teaches projections and critical thinking, a bit of math to calculate how to maximize as you try to get more marbles than your opponent.
• any electronic version of board games: Monopoly, Scrabble, Scattergories, etc. all taught strategy in addition to academic and life skills: counting, money, spelling, facts.
• Monopoly, especially having students research the locations or objects featured in any of the special editions

So you see educational gaming has come a long way: it's not just improved graphic capabilities, it's that they are more interdisciplinary and more interactive. With enough time, students will hopefully gain knowledge and skills and have fun doing so.

iRevolution: iPod Touch in the Classroom

Note the eMacs in the background. Ubiquitous computing in the flesh!

With the hurrah over the iPad, I wandered over to my local Apple Store, which was packed as usual. I ventured tentatively in to the front door and asked the salesperson, "What's the big deal?" All he could discuss were the "apps", which didn't impress me: I just bought myself a birthday iPod Touch and to date have only purchased 1 game that I'm obsessed with and one of my all-time favorite albums. The other apps I've downloaded are all free and about 90% entertainment, 10% productive/informative/educational. I thanked him then walked out.

Then my eye doctor asked me about the iPad: initially I said, "I don't get it," but being in a doctor's office I recanted, "I can see how it would have great use in a hospital, especially with digitizing medical records." He agreed. Then I convinced him not to upgrade to Windows 7, to downgrade to Windows XP...I'm lethal!

Then a friend mentioned getting a Touch to entertain her 1 year old and we researched age appropriate entertainment options: come to find out, there are enough apps for keeping actual kids of all ages occupied, not just kids at heart!

iRevolution (continued): iPad

Yesterday I realized it would be easy to have an iPad connect wirelessly to my projector to enable walking around while demonstrating. The problem is my students are on PCs and Apple and PC are not speaking on speaking terms (Apple is not speaking with a lot of proprietary formats right now). So even though I can foresee a use good enough for me to invest in the iPad (for teaching purposes, of course :), I'll have to take my own advice and wait for the next generation or for Apple to play nice with other formats.

Lesson Plan templates

Nothing screws with a tech teacher worse than spending hours preparing a lesson just to have some element not work, either technical or curricular. Today I downloaded documents to help me plan my lessons for the rest of the school year ... so that I can squeeze in the curricular and extra-curricular lessons I want my students to learn! Microsoft Office's templates feature a number of lesson planning documents that will work just fine and I don't have to 'reinvent the wheel'. In order to download any of these you must use Internet Explorer:

• Substitute Teacher Guide will come in handy to ensure my lesson schedule continues as I plan which professional development conferences I attend
• Monthly Unit Planner for an overview of what you wish to accomplish each month
• Weekly Planner so week to week you can adjust your monthly planner (personally I like to have a monthly overview then work on each lesson, so I have a binder with units and lesson-level sheets to accompany each unit)
  
• Lesson Planner to plan details of each lesson
• Lesson Planner to remind you to define concepts for younger tech students

Other templates are available at Microsoft Office's Template site (link to custom search for "lesson plan")